A Global Warming Snow Job

“More than two-thirds of the nation’s land mass had snow on the ground,” the Associated Press reported last week, “and then it snowed ever so slightly in Florida to make it 49 states out of 50.” Only Hawaii remained snow free. So far, anyway.

While shoveling, then, Americans could be forgiven for mumbling, “bring on some global warming.” Ah, but we won’t be forgiven by the likes of Thomas Friedman, globe-trotting environmentalist columnist at The New York Times.

“Of the festivals of nonsense that periodically overtake American politics, surely the silliest is the argument that because Washington is having a particularly snowy winter it proves that climate change is a hoax,” Friedman wrote on Feb. 17. “You really wonder if we can have a serious discussion about the climate-energy issue anymore.”

Yes, you do. Mostly because the folks who want us to believe that humans are changing the planet’s climate insist the “science” is “settled” and so there’s nothing to talk about. Of course, many of these folks then get caught making up their data and behaving like hypocrites.

For example, Friedman’s Times Web page features video of a CNBC interview with him, “at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.” Hum. Wonder how Mr. Alternative Energy got to the Alps for that meeting. Did he peddle himself across the Atlantic in a carbon-neutral paddleboat, glide across the continent on efficient mass transit and then ascend the mountain on a dogsled? It’s impossible to believe he’d go the old-fashioned way: via carbon-belching plane and car.

In any event, “the climate-science community should convene its top experts -- from places like NASA, America’s national laboratories, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, the California Institute of Technology and the U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre -- and produce a simple 50-page report,” Friedman advises. “They could call it ‘What We Know,’ summarizing everything we already know about climate change in language that a sixth grader could understand, with unimpeachable peer-reviewed footnotes.”

Wait -- didn’t they already do that? In 2007, a United Nations outfit known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produced the definitive report on “what we know” about climate change. This report was so iron-clad it won the Nobel Peace Prize.